Someone asked above how Obamacare will change corporate taxes.
Companies with enough workers either buy health insurance for their employees (or a large part of it) or pay a fine.
From what I understand, today, employers get a deduction for healthcare insurance premiums it pays. If the deduction is so large that it causes a loss for the year, the company can carry its losses to other years while it gets back on its feet.
Obamacare is a fine. Fines are due regardless of whether the company is profitable or not. Fines are not deductible against income. If the tax rate equivalized fine is lower then the cash outlay, then companies are going to be incentized to pay the fine.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/05/17/two-obamacare-mandates-that-dramatically-expand-the-internal-revenue-services-power/
How these mandates expands IRS’ power—and your employers’
Now that you know the details of the individual and employer mandates, you can see why the IRS needs to hire thousands of additional agents in order to enforce them.
To enforce the individual mandate, the IRS needs to know whether or not you have purchased insurance this year. It will also need to know the specific insurance policy you have, in order to ensure that it meets Obamacare’s “minimum essential coverage” requirement.
To enforce the employer mandate, the IRS needs the same information from employers in terms of the specific policies employers purchase for their workers, and also the hours worked by every part-time employee. In addition, your employer will need to know what your household income is, in order to ensure that the coverage it offers you is “affordable” to you by the law’s definition.
Some conservatives are raising the alarm: can a politicized IRS handle these duties in a non-partisan way? Or will your health records get leaked by the agency? Indeed, the IRS is subject to a class-action lawsuit in California, alleging that the IRS has improperly obtained personal medical records for 10 million individuals in that state, without a warrant.
Others are suggesting that the duty to enforce the individual and employer mandates be taken out of IRS’ hands and moved into another agency. But, to me, this doesn’t make much sense. Do we really want another government agency to have sensitive information about our incomes and our insurance policies?
The only viable solution to this problem is to repeal the employer mandate altogether, and to replace the individual mandate with something else, like alimited open enrollment period, that does not require expanding the power and the authority of the IRS.
Repealing the employer mandate will give employers additional incentive to dump workers onto Obamacare’s exchanges. But, in my view, this is on balance a good thing, because it will mean that individuals can shop for insurance themselves, something that economists of all stripes support.
I continue to believe that it is unlikely at this stage that Republicans will be able to repeal Obamacare as a whole. But they could do much to improve our health-care system, and much to contain the power of the IRS, by repealing two of its most offensive mandates.
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